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What I learned today

Good News. We got the apartment!! Huzzah *raises spoon* we are signing the lease on Thursday! Yay!

I had a good dinner…chicken kababs with pita bread and a side of hummus and cucumber tomato salad.

Today in CogSci, we learned about idiot savants, individuals with a handicap such as autism that nevertheless have extraordinary talents. Loads of videos can be found at the Savant Syndrome section of the Wisconsin Medical Society. Some of the savants have major talent. But some of them have interesting but ultimately (I feel) useless talent such as the ability to memorize pi to the 22,000th digit or to tell you what day of the week any date will fall on. I would be more impressed if instead of mental math, they were mathematicians putting forth theories and making new discoveries.

In part of the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, we learned about the horrible plight of David Reimer, “was a Canadian man who was born as a healthy boy, but was sexually reassinged and raised as female in an attempt to improve his life after his penis was inadvertently destroyed during circumcision [Wikipedia].” The change did not work and David always felt like he was in the wrong body. I feel like I would never have my kid circumcised now. What kind of doctor could go from removing a little bit of foreskin to destroying the penius?!? What happened to this man was terrible.

In lecture we learned about Phineas Gage, a miner who survived having a metal rod enter his left checkbone and exit out his prefrontal cortex. His intelligence remained intact but he lost the ability to make rational decisions because he could no longer involve his emotions in the process.